Every week, Forza Horizon 4 features a new Forzathon weekly challenge. These charge you with owning a particular car and using it to complete a series of challenges. This past week's challenge has been called Horizon Anniversary and marks the release, six years ago this week, of the first Forza Horizon. To complete it, you need to own a 1995 Volkswagen Corrado VR6, rack up two million skill score with it, win a race in it, and carry on racing to earn a few clean racing skills.

Microsoft restarted its programme of Xbox One X enhancements for Xbox 360 games this week with four new titles - Forza Horizon, The Witcher 2, Crackdown and Fable Anniversary Edition. We're seeing the same 9x resolution boost on all releases in concert with improved performance where appropriate, but it's the first game in this new line-up that's our focus today. Image quality in Forza Horizon is off the charts in the transition to ultra HD and there are a couple of further, surprising enhancements that caught our eye.

Forza Horizon was the driving game released into the wild, its cars cast off into the fun and fury of the untamed open road. It makes sense that its first substantial add-on takes to the wilderness, then - although the Rally Expansion Pack initially feels tame.

This is a standalone add-on, and one that sits within its own menu tucked away from the open-ended sprawl of Horizon's main Colorado map. There's no sense of discovery here; instead, it's simply a succession of off-road time trial events, there to be unlocked until you've hit the points cap and reached the Rally final.

So what's Forza Horizon without that dizzying sense of liberty, that free-wheeling taste of adventure that marked the main game out? It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it's a well-crafted and enjoyable driving experience, even when torn away from the element that helped make it all so exciting originally.

I finally saw the documentary Senna this year. I'm late to the party, I know. The film came out in 2010, and it chronicles the career of the late Brazilian Formula One champion Ayrton Senna, perhaps the best racing driver in history. I took my time getting around to Senna because I don't really consider myself a car guy.

Motor racing, despite its roots in France, its scarlet red Italian heart and its current domination at the top tier by a German and a Spaniard, is a very British affair. In the heart of England, amidst the pockets of nondescript countryside of Banbury, Oxford and Woking there's the self-titled Motorsport Valley, where a large part of the global circus that's F1 calls home.

Judged in terms of established precedents, Forza Horizon simply has no right to be this good. Handing off the keys to a prestige franchise to an all-new development studio was a massive gamble in itself, but the risk-taking doesn't end there. Playground Games didn't take the obvious safe route and simply iterate on the existing formula using the established engine: instead the fledgling developer took that technology, retained its core attributes and then expanded upon them, taking the whole franchise in a new direction.

During production of yesterday's Digital Foundry vs. Forza Horizon article, we reached out to Playground Games with a view to adding their input to our analysis on this exceptional game. We could only include some of their information in our piece, but the team was so lavish and exhaustive in its replies to our questions that we realised that we'd be doing our readers a disservice by not publishing the entire transcript verbatim.

Initially you can hook up your Microsoft device while using the new Xbox Video and Xbox Music services. These are widely available from today, when the new Xbox 360 dashboard update begins the next and final stage of its roll-out.

Forza Horizon is one of those games that tries too hard to look hip. Its characters and setting - a festival of music and motor racing - share the same sanitised vision of youth culture you see in ads for mobile networks. Its colour scheme is black with hot pink and every menu rests at a 15 degree angle. Achievements have titles like 'OMG' and '#WINNING'.

Perhaps it's trying to correct the famous lack of charisma of its parent series Forza Motorsport, from Microsoft's in-house team Turn 10. Or perhaps it's trying to cover up a strain of rank commercialism, since it's plastered in sponsor logos and invitations to buy tokens for shortcuts. An offshoot made by another studio - new UK outfit Playground - Forza Horizon comes across like a marketing drive first and a game second, tainted as it is with buzzwords like "brand extension" and "annual cadence".

Prepare to swallow your cynicism, however, because Forza Horizon is a quite brilliant racing game - one of the best of its generation. It's also a lesson in how to make that development model work to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Fable, Gears of War: Judgment and Dance Central 3 join Halo 4 and Forza Horizon on the show floor.

Right. Can't remember if we've mentioned this, but we're doing a show at Earls Court in London next week. It's called the Eurogamer Expo. (Bit pretentious?) Anyway, we hope some of you will come. To help make it more interesting, we've asked Microsoft to bring everything they have in development for Xbox 360 for you to play. They said yes.

So, if you come along you'll be able to sample Halo 4 Infinity Multiplayer, Forza Horizon, Fable: The Journey for Kinect, Gears of War: Judgment's OverRun multiplayer mode, and Dance Central 3, plus various Xbox Live games.

We're also told that "the Mountain Dew crew" will be distributing drinks to people throughout the show. Presumably they'll be distributing Mountain Dew, unless that label is just a massive coincidence.

Turn 10 and Playground's forthcoming open world racer Forza Horizon will be receiving monthly DLC updates, and it'll be getting a full expansion pack on 18th December.

Which isn't too dissimilar to what its predecessor Forza Motorsport 4 does, really. Like Forza 4, the monthly DLC updates will take the form of car packs, and like Forza 4 they'll be available either individually or can be drip-fed through Turn 10's petrol-teat via a Season Pass.

Forza Horizon's a collaboration between Turn 10 and Playground, a new UK studio formed of veterans from the racing scene. It's also to utilize a Kinect feature that allows you to control the GPS unit by voice alone, proving that the future of motion control is perhaps just about moving your mouth around a bit until noises come out.

No assists, no racing line and the in-car view - taking on the open road in Playground's racer.

When the Washington-based Turn 10 makes Forza games, it does so with a European accent. It's a slightly forced one at times, but there's still an understatement and refinement to the Forza Motorsport series that belies the game's American roots.

MY WORK IS NEARLY COMPLETE. Yes, as soon as two more people give me sign-off then I can tell you about the remaining secret treasures that will soon occupy the lingering gaps on this year's Eurogamer Expo developer sessions schedule page.

Forza Horizon made its official debut at Microsoft's E3 conference and duly had a release date slapped on it, with Playground and Turn 10's open world racer coming on October 23.

While few concrete details have emerged on Forza Horizon - a collaboration between Turn 10 and Playground, a new studio headed up by former Codemasters staff - a new trailer seemed to confirm it as an open world racer that takes place in the wilds of the American west.

We'll have a full blowout on the game coming your way as Microsoft's conference wraps up at 7pm BST.

But there's one vital aspect of autophilia that these circuit racing games can't satisfy. It's the thrill of getting into your car, pointing its nose at the vanishing point, opening the throttle and seeing where it takes you. People don't just love cars because they're beautiful and fast - they love them because they hold the promise of freedom and exploration, of power over your own destiny. It's a dream no amount of laps of Silverstone or Laguna Seca can realise, and it's one that's close to my heart.

In modern gaming, that dream is best expressed by the ramshackle yet loveable Test Drive Unlimited games, with their full-size recreations of the islands of Oahu and Ibiza to cruise around. There are some fine open-world arcade racers too, especially Criterion's Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, but their hyperactive, drifty action racing is too far removed from reality to count as wish-fulfilment. That's why I love TDU more than it arguably deserves.

Forza Horizon, a new game developed by Playground Games, has been announced, and will be coming to Xbox 360 this autumn.

Details on the game, announced at Microsoft's Spring Showcase, remain thin on the ground, although speculation has it down as an open world racer in the mold of Test Drive Unlimited.

Questions regarding the nature of Forza Horizon were swiftly dodged. "I don't believe it's against the ethos of Forza to do a lot of different things," said Greenwalt. When asked whether Horizon would offer a sim-based driving experience at 60fps - two things that have to date defined the series - his answer was equally vague.